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In Memory of Raúl Ruiz (a guest post by Jeremy M. Davies)

Raúl Ruiz (1941–2011)

These are the days that try cinephiles’ souls, and I suppose one may give one’s penchant for hyperbole a little extra elbow room on such mornings. Suffice to say that if I had a favorite living filmmaker, Ra(o)úl Ruiz was he. The only film course I’ve ever taught was on Ruiz; I’ve proselytized for him (as many long-suffering friends will report) at every opportunity. [This is true. —Adam]

The fact that his Mysteries of Lisbon was picked up for U.S. distribution by the good people at the Music Box seemed to me something of a miracle given his 100+ films’ failure to make much of a mark on American moviegoers, even when the five or six that have screened in theaters here over the last twenty years got seen, reviewed, etc. You are unlikely to see a better movie than Mysteries this year—it’s showing at Lincoln Center even now, and will be traveling west with the coming weeks. [For more on that film, see this article by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky.]

Anyone with an interest in film and/or the construction of narrative owes it to themselves to pick up copies of Poetics of Cinema I and II, both of which are available in English, and are closer to speculative essay/fictions, à la Calvino or Gass, than simply (?) film criticism.

This article, and others at Jonathan Rosenbaum’s site, will go some way toward being more eloquent than I am able, this morning.

The hoary old story goes that, at Lubitsch’s funeral, Billy Wilder said: “No more Lubitsch.” William Wyler replied, “Worse than that—no more Lubitsch films.”

Even I, who have scoured outlets both legal and illegal for copies of Ruiz’s movies, have seen barely a quarter of his total output. So it’s silly to say “no more Ruiz films.” But knowing that he’ll now never reach his second “century” casts a bit of a pall.

The best way to mourn Ruiz is perhaps to play with some model trains while suffering from massive head trauma and being observed by a blindfolded woman in white behind a two-way mirror. I hope you’ll join me in doing so.

[Jeremy M. Davies is the author of the critically-acclaimed film-centric novel Rose Alley, and an editor at Dalkey Archive Press in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.]

I want to echo Jeremy’s tribute, though I’m far less able to do so. To my shame, and despite Jeremy’s constant urging, I’ve still seen only a handful of Ruiz films: Klimt, Three Crowns, On Top of the Whale, Dog’s Dialogue. Looks like it’s well past time for me to start catching up…

But favorite living filmmaker? Not Rivette? I guess Rivette can be that now…. (Me, I’d probably pick Rivette or Tsai. Godard isn’t eligible since he’s immortal.)

Hello, I’m Sabbir Chowdhury, a film critic from Bangladesh. Like many film critics, I had the chance to watch a handful of his films. I met him once at Rotterdam Film Festival back in 2004 (where I was a member of the jury of the Internarnational Film Critics Association, FIPRESCI). It’s a great loss for cinema, because filmmakers like Raul Ruiz are not born every year. We’ll miss him indeed!